


new dawn fades

by midsommur



Category: The Batman (Movie 2021)
Genre: F/M, orig posted on my tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:54:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27121423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midsommur/pseuds/midsommur
Summary: it’s not as bad as it was before.TW: former/past self harm
Relationships: Bruce Wayne/Reader
Comments: 1
Kudos: 33





	new dawn fades

It’s not as bad as it was before.

The mantra she repeats to herself as she stitches him the same way she’d learned to sew small holes in her clothes. As she sutures the torn pieces of his bloody skin, fixes him as best as she could to try and make him whole again. As she wraps his sore arms in bandages and plasters the gashes in his sides with gauze. As she stares at the blood seeping through the white of the cotton, like there wasn’t any even there at all.

It’s not as bad as it was before.

“Al—I can get Alfred to do it,” he grunts.

“No. Let him sleep.”

Her efforts, seemingly futile, are not so entirely. She would never be so ignorant to doubt that Bruce wasn’t thankful for her nightly ministrations, inspecting nearly every inch of his body until he was practically mummified in gauze and bandages. She knew he was grateful. He would prove it through coming home with less bleeding red injuries and more purple-blue bumps. Less things to sew, more things to press soft kisses to.

Time would pass. It would be easier. It’s not as bad as it was before.

Still, it racks her brain as he coddles her close to his chest at night. When he can sleep, passed out from exhaustion, but she can’t, still wired from the copious amounts of coffee, waiting for him to come home in one solid piece. When the looming fear of Bruce not coming home no longer stays to sit with her and keep her company, and she’s left alone with her thoughts. They taste like pennies in her mouth, the words that she keeps locked inside her head.

Bruce has her held tightly to him, her back against his chest. His breath lingers on the nape of her neck, and his arms are wound up in hers, hands locked in each-others grip. It is safety and security in the purest sense of the word.

And she feels it, truly. In his arms, she has never felt safer. But the sight of them, the scars, littering his body, they astonish her. The overwhelming amount. The collection growing under her hands, as if she can’t sew him up and fix him fast enough. The ones that she can’t see, the ones that she can.

The ones on his arms. On his wrists.

He’d told her long ago, with short words and little eye contact. When she had caught his gaze, his eyes were shameful, then blank all-together.

He was ten, after his parents died. All he’d felt was pain, nothing but, and if he wasn’t putting his pain to use, then it was better off as nothing. Gone. Dead. And so he’d done it—the irreversible. Marked himself, worse than any criminal could ever do to him.  


It was that moment, he’d told her, when no one answered his anguished prayers, that he’d made his vow. To continue to die, night after night, warring on criminals on behalf of his parents. To become the Batman. To become suicide.

From then on, from the time he told her to now, Bruce was certainly better off, or so it would seem. He’d put his cowl on every night as if it were his duty to protect Gotham and its citizens, rather than to actively try and get himself killed. But the initial reason would never change. The initial reason stares her in the face as she tries to sleep.

The scars on his arms, the marks from his father’s razor blades, they hold a gripping, morbid fascination against her. Try as she might, she couldn’t look away. Physically, she couldn’t unwind her arms from Bruce’s. And she couldn’t close her eyes, for when she shut them, they would still be there.

A reminder.

A harsh, cruel, and painful one. The worst of them all.

She thought she could hold it in, after all, that’s what she had been doing from the moment he revealed them to her. But for some reason, be it the moon, the stars, or the everchanging state of dread based on whether or not Bruce was okay, safe beside her or not, she just could not keep it contained any longer, even though he was—for all intents and purposes—fine. And he was. Right now, he was. He is. He’s next to her, and as she sobs into the sheets, he holds her.

“Hey,” he coos, sitting up to make sure his eyes and ears aren’t deceiving him. That this isn’t a nightmare, that the love of his whole life was really crying next to him. “Honey, baby, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she gasps out, in between sobs and coughs. “Nothing, I’m sorry, I just had a bad dream.”

Bruce takes her into his arms, helping her to sit up so that she doesn’t choke on her tears. He strokes her hair and soothes her back, his rough, calloused hand feeling ever so soft and heavenly against her skin. Eventually, her cries sputter out into sniffles. His comforting hand on her back never wavers.

She tucks her face warmly against his neck, reveling in his scent, his physicality. The fact that he’s here. She savors him, in every way she can. While he’s still here, still able to hold her in his arms—whether they were bloody or bandaged, he would still hold her all the same.

She would stitch him all back together, as best as she could. In return, he would come home to her. He’d steal her worries and banish them away with a kiss to her forehead, whispers of assurances melting into her temple. He would tell her this way, that he was alright, he was fine, he was okay.

Because of her.


End file.
